The just-so story was invented by Rudyard Kipling when writing fanciful tales for small children about such things as how the leopard got its spots (Kipling 1902). The term was then appropriated by others to apply to cases in which a critic thought that an explanation was as juvenile and silly as those provided by Kipling. Although use of the just-so story to denigrate someone else’s idea preceded Stephen Jay Gould’s use of the term (Smith 2016), Gould’s repeated application of the just-so story canard (Olsen and Arroyo-Santos 2015) to sociobiological hypotheses and research (e.g., Gould 1978, 1980, 2002) led to the current tight association between Gould’s anti-adaptationist views and the just-so story. While it is true that Gould (with Lewontin) did not use the label in their most famous and widely cited article (Gould and Lewontin 1979), they did criticize the adaptationist program in that paper as one that relies “on plausibility alone as a criterion for the acceptance of...
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Alcock, J. (2018). Just So Stories. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1378-1
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